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Can You Introduce Yourself and Tell Us How You Are Working with Wilderness?

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Can You Introduce Yourself and Tell Us How You Are Working with Wilderness? INTERVIEW WITH EDWARD ZAHNISER BY LAURA BUCHHEIT and MARK MADISON AUGUST 11, 2004, NCTC, SHEPHERDSTOWN, WV MS. BUCHHEIT: Can you introduce yourself and tell us how you are working with wilderness? MR. ZAHNISER: I got into working with wilderness by accident of birth. My father Howard Zahniser worked for the Wilderness Society in Washington, D.C. from a few months before my birth in 1945 until his death in 1964. I grew up among the people of the early Wilderness Society and the early wilderness movement. And just as any young kid growing up would, I merely thought of these people as my father’s associates and people who showed up in Washington occasionally. We lived in the Washington, D.C. suburbs, in Maryland. But we spent many summers in the wilderness of the Adirondacks, and later in other wild areas throughout the country. At age 15 I was able to go to the Sheenjek country in Alaska—in what is now part of the Artic National Wildlife Refuge—with Olaus and Mardy Murie. From there we went down to what is now Denali National Park and Preserve with Adolph and Louise Murie. It was then Mount McKinley National Park, Adolph was in Denali working on his book on Alaska bears then, so we had a couple of weeks there in Mount McKinley National Park. That was probably the most influential summer of my life. From that trip, when I got back to the Washington area, I just went up to the Adirondacks with my mother and one of my siblings for the rest of the summer. It was a wild summer, but very influential in my future career choices and in my continuing interest in wilderness as something that needs to be preserved. MS. BUCHHEIT: Is wilderness a part of your current work as this point, or is it more something that is an avocation outside of work? MR. ZAHNISER: My present work doesn’t involve wilderness work in a major sense, but my job description includes public speaking about conservation history, including 1 wilderness. So I do a certain amount of that. I am also involved with various authors who are writing about wilderness, in particular, from a historic standpoint in terms of the history of the Wilderness Act. I have a certain amount of background just by growing up around my father and his associates in the 1950s. I was the youngest child, so I was still at home until the year before he died. I did a lot of traipsing around Washington with him to North American Wildlife Conference meetings, and other conservation happenings. They were just interesting things to do at the time. I’ve been working closely with my father’s biographer, environmental historian Mark Harvey. He has been engaged with a biography scheduled for publication in September 2005. I have worked with a number of other people on writing projects that deal with wilderness and related topics. For the last 15 years, particularly, I’ve had to educate myself to help these people out! It has been a good education, much of it from them. MS. BUCHHEIT: It sounds like wilderness is a way of life for you. It seems to infiltrate all aspects of your life. MR. ZAHNISER: Yes, I think wilderness values have an impact on my whole life. The experiences in the Sheenjek country in 1961 gave me a real sense of wildness that has been very influential. MS. BUCHHEIT: How has wilderness inspired you? Are there some specific ways? MR. ZAHNISER: Wilderness has inspired me in the sense that it’s very instructive about what I feel is our role in the world. Bill McKibben puts it very well, writing that we are very, very small, but we can matter so much. That’s one of the understandings that drives my involvement in continuing attempts in our culture to preserve wilderness and to try to see it preserved in perpetuity—which is the huge challenge. It’s one thing to set aside areas. It’s another thing to make sure that they remain wild. My father wrote in his essay, The Need for Wilderness Areas, that the defining character of wilderness is it’s wildness. That’s what must be maintained, wildness. 2 MS. BUCHHEIT: Do you have a sense of how a place can be preserved wild in perpetuity? How can that be done? MR. ZAHNISER: To preserve something in perpetuity in our culture is obviously a great challenge. Politically, in our culture perpetuity means every two years because there is a new Congress every two years. The decision to preserve wilderness lies with the Congress. One hopes that the Congress is, as it is by design, responsive to the people. But to preserve something in perpetuity in a culture such as ours is definitely a challenge. The cultural ecologist E.N. Anderson has written that conservation is not about natural resources, it’s about the social contract. So that’s both the good part and the bad part as you think about preserving something in perpetuity in this culture. Wildness really is at the mercy of the social contract. We will only preserve wildness in perpetuity if we will to do so as a culture. In that sense, yes, it is difficult, but in the sense that we indeed in this nation have a Wilderness Act, which was a pretty difficult chore to accomplish, I think that there is hope that we can preserve wilderness in perpetuity. MS. BUCHHEIT: How can individuals, how can people make that happen? What can people do today to ensure that wilderness and wildness are preserved in perpetuity? MR. ZAHNISER: I think people can do two things. On the state and national level they can be involved in advocating the preservation of wilderness. But as Leopold wrote, particularly in the second part of his career as a writer, we must begin to preserve wildness where we live as well. He does not say that if do that we don’t need to preserve wilderness. Both are important. We do need these big wilderness areas for the purposes that he and many others have enumerated—of science and recreation and the evolutionary record of who we are and where we came from. But we must learn to keep wildness alive where we live as well, because wildness is the true contact with who we are. We are products of this world that we live in and wildness is the picture of the world as it operates by it’s own will and not by the projection of human desire. 3 MS. BUCHHEIT: Does somebody have to be in wilderness in order to appreciate it? Does someone have to have that contact, that immersion in wilderness, in order to benefit from it and to appreciate it? MR. ZAHNISER: I think to appreciate wilderness one need not be in wilderness. The greatest value of wilderness in our culture is the so-called ‘knowledge that it is there’ value. In the hearing records of the Wilderness Act, time after time people say that they have no expectation of going to this or any specific wilderness area, but it’s very important to them just to know that it is there. I think people have a real sense of the value, to them and to the future, of all of us having access to a glimpse of what the historian Bill Brown has called, “the world as it was.” Every child can benefit by having access to seeing firsthand the world as it was. I also think that the greatest value of wilderness lies in the generations yet unborn. This is echoed in Theodore Roosevelt’s great statement that the greatest value of conservation “…lies in the womb of time.” If we are truly democratic we will try to project that opportunity into the future, whose interests should numerically, we hope, greatly outweigh our own interests. The value of wilderness lies very much in the knowledge that it’s there now and in the future option. It’s a great responsibility of our culture to keep that option alive. MS. BUCHHEIT: What are some of the challenges facing the preservation of wilderness today? MR. ZAHNISER: The challenges that face wilderness preservation today are the challenges of increasing urbanization of the nation. Many, many children used to grow up with access to wild lands of one sort or another. I was in the Adirondack Mountains last week and talking with a resident there. Someone brought up the topic of hunting. He said, “Well hunting is becoming increasingly passé, there’s just not a lot of people doing it.” Some people would feel that hunting is inimical to some of the values that we’re talking about here, but historically hunters and anglers were great proponents of first, saving wild game, and second, saving the land that people understood you must save if you were to have these animals. In a recent outdoor magazine a high school teacher 4 wrote that when he first started teaching, if he asked about hunting and angling, maybe forty percent of the students in his class would say that they did that. Now, it is unusual for anyone in his class to say, ‘Yes, I do hunting or fishing.’ There’s that lack of exposure to the natural world. I was with the Leopold Education Project a couple of years ago in Wisconsin. That organization deals mainly with teachers and nature center staff, training them in teaching Leopold’s land ethic. Those educators, one hundred percent, say that if you are going to transfer these values to another generation you have to get the kids outdoors.
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